A number of devices have been proposed over the past years for automatically playing musical instruments. Small music boxes are classical examples, and automatic pianos that play musical pieces according to electronically stored musical score data have come to be widely used. Attempts have been made to automatically play string instruments, but few practical solutions have been proposed because of the complex mechanisms such as robot arms that are required to properly pluck the strings.
It is known to season or age string instruments. When a string instrument is left alone without being played for a prolonged period of time, the instrument may become unable to produce the desired sound quality. Therefore, it is practiced to play a string instrument at a prescribed interval to maintain the string instrument in proper order, and this is called as “seasoning”. When a string instrument is freshly manufactured, it may also be unable to produce the intended sound quality. For this reason, the freshly manufactured string instrument is sometimes “aged” or played for a prescribed time period before it is delivered to the buyer of the string instrument. As the work of seasoning and aging is laborious, it has been proposed to cause the strings of string instruments to vibrate by using special powered vibrating devices for the purpose of aging or seasoning the string instruments.
For instance, Patent Document 1 discloses an arrangement in which a vibrating device is attached to a violin via a bridge cradle that can be detachably mounted on the bridge of the violin to vibrate the violin. It is also disclosed to interpose a vibrating device between the soundboard and the strings of a guitar to vibrate the guitar. However, because the force by which the vibrating device is attached to the string instrument is limited, only a low power vibration can be applied to the string instrument. If a high power vibration which is powerful enough to use the string instrument as a loudspeaker is applied to the string instrument, the vibrating device may be caused to rattle, and a desired vibration of the string instrument cannot be achieved. The vibrating device may even be detached from the string instrument during use.
The string instrument itself may be worked upon or modified so as to firmly attach the vibrating device to the string instrument, but this impairs the quality of the string instrument to such an extent as to render the string instrument incapable of producing the expected sound quality and damage the external appearance of the string instrument. Typically, such modification catastrophically depreciates the value of the string instrument.
Patent Document 2 proposes to use a violin as a loudspeaker by modifying the violin itself. The vibrating device is installed inside the violin in such a manner that the vibrating device is required to be installed during the manufacturing of the violin. Thus, the violin is not an ordinary violin from the beginning. A vibrating device could be installed in an existing violin with some effort, but no such undertaking is conceivable if the violin happens to be a costly one.